Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Been Phished Lately?

And I'm not talking about the band (who I wouldn't know if they bit me)...

The rascally denizens of the web are getting very creative. (See the link).

If you aren't using a Mac, at least consider using another browser: Opera, FireFox, Mozilla or even Netscape!

(BTW: 100th Post!)

A friend from church was telling me that he was putting together a wish list for a new computer so that he could put home video onto DVD. He was waiting until he could pay cash for it. (Smart guy - airplane mechanic.)

We went over for dinner and afterwards men and women drifted in separate directions. We talked. We looked at his computer. LavaSoft's Ad-Aware SE Personal edition found ~153 tracking cookies, spyware, adware whilst Spybot S&D found at least 100 more, including some registry keys that indicated something had turned off warnings for the disabling of Anti-virus and Firewall software - not at all uncommon, really. :^/ I introduced him to FireFox as well.

On the following Wednesday evening, he reports that it's so fast that he probably won't be building a new PC. :^)

So, we're over there again on Monday afternoon. He says that it's running slowly again, he hadn't run Spybot or Ad-Aware again, would I look at it? Sure. The first thing I see is a minimized IE (Internet Explorer) button in the Task Bar.

*sigh*

So, Spybot finds ~190 problems. Ad-Aware finds more, too. Hmmm...

Had he told his wife not to use IE? Nope.

It's an old story: The demon is cast out of the house, but later finds nothing taking his place, invites a host of others over for a party.

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